Healthcare

Not about expanding care

Three days before today's media event, where chosen representatives can say their last words before the nuclear option is set off, The President's Proposal on "healthcare reform" was released.

These 11 pages do not start with a blank sheet of paper, as Republicans recommended, but with the 2,000-page Senate bill. They are getting a disproportionate amount of commentary, but amount to little difference.

The $100 billion added to the price tag, the total net work of 100,000 millionaires, is but one-tenth of the total $1 trillion. This is not real money residing in a Lock Box in Washington, or even in the bank accounts of currently living taxpayers. It will be created out of nothing, so lack of a Congressional Budget Office pronouncement on it doesn't matter much.

The House, Senate, and President set different income thresholds and percentage of income that people will have to pay in premiums for their mandated Health Plan. This is a low-wage trap: if your earnings exceed a certain threshold, all of your extra income will be sucked into the Health Plan. That is like a 100 percent marginal tax rate. For some people, the marginal tax will be greater than 100 percent. That means that the more you earn, the less you take home.

What you will get in return is all the health care the Secretary of HHS, or appointed bureaucrats, decide you should haveassuming it is available.

The Secretary is to set standards to "enable determination of an individual's eligibility and financial responsibility for specific services prior to or at the point of service," according to the Senate bill.

A sophisticated computer infrastructure can keep track of eligibility, to assure fairness. The computer can tell whether your ethnic group, your region, or your age group has already had its fair share of knee replacements, CT scans, coronary artery stents, and so on.

And you can keep your doctorif he's still in practice. The President's Proposal could pre-emptively exclude doctors deemed to be "potentially fraudulent providers." Or it may drive them out of business by aggressively "recovering overpayments" and levying huge penalties for billing errors or "unnecessary services"now called "waste, fraud, or abuse."

A survey by Investor's Business Daily suggested that under ObamaCare, 45 percent of doctors would quit. It wasn't a scientific survey, and people don't necessarily do what they say. Maybe only 30 percent would quit, just as millions more people are demanding service. In a recent informal survey by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), fewer than 30 percent of physicians said they would voluntarily participate in a public plan similar to Medicare.

Doctors who remain may restrict their practice to giving Botox injections. But even those signed up with your Plan might be doing something besides taking care of you. Dealing with the government-imposed computerized record might take up 25 percent or more of the doctor's time. Then there's time spent collecting information pertaining to eligibility (such as your exact ethnic group and lifestyle); documenting the mandated wellness checks; and providing the services that improve the doctor's quality measures.

A new favorite word seems to be "strengthen," which means increasing the power of government.

It's all part of Changetruly radical, redistributive changefrom confidential sickness care by highly trained physicians trying to heal individuals, to public "health care" by minimally trained "providers" trying to regiment and level society.